Productronica stand highlights ‘no-nails’ testing

Visitors to the ASSET stand at Productronica (Hall A1, Stand 470) will hear how multiple non-intrusive board test technologies operating from the same ScanWorks® platform deliver the test coverage that has eroded in recent years from intrusive, probe-based test technologies, such as in-circuit test (ICT), flying probe test, manufacturing defect analyzers and others.

The effectiveness of older hardware-intense test technologies like ICT is rapidly diminishing. These technologies rely on expensive, hard-to-maintain bed-of-nails fixtures that make physical contact with test points or pads on circuit boards. Unfortunately, the speed, complexity and sensitivity of circuit boards with state-of-the art processors like Intel®’s Atom™ or Xeon® Processor 5500 Series, ARM® and AMD® devices or PowerPC™ processors have reached a point where making physical contact with a probe does not deliver reliable test results.

ASSET experts at Productronica will show how the software-driven non-intrusive test technologies running on the ScanWorks platform can surpass the test coverage that the intrusive test technologies have lost. The non-intrusive test technologies on ScanWorks – boundary scan test, processor-controlled test and BIST – take an ‘inside/out’ approach rather than the ‘outside/in’ approach of intrusive probe-based technologies.

Non-intrusive technologies apply electrical test patterns that are internal to the circuit board. These tests exercise the board, the results are observed and failures noted. Extensive diagnostic capabilities pinpoint the locations of failures to facilitate rapid repair. Either a simple connector on the printed circuit board or a processor interposer links the board-under-test to the ScanWorks platform running on an inexpensive personal computer (PC).

In addition, ASSET experts will discuss several newly emerging industry standards that enhance the effectiveness of non-intrusive test for chips, boards and systems. These standards include the IEEE 1149.7 compact boundary-scan standard and the IEEE P1687 IJTAG standard for managing embedded instrumentation.

For more information on Productronica, click here.